


all too well

by adiwriting



Series: Heartbeat [6]
Category: Roswell New Mexico (TV 2019)
Genre: Angst, M/M, Mprg, Single Dad Michael
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-27
Updated: 2021-02-27
Packaged: 2021-03-18 22:07:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,525
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29740578
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/adiwriting/pseuds/adiwriting
Summary: Michael and Alex attempt to talk after hooking up at the reunion.
Relationships: Michael Guerin/Alex Manes
Series: Heartbeat [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2178315
Comments: 45
Kudos: 113





	all too well

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ALovelyLitwit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ALovelyLitwit/gifts).



> Continuing in the birthday week fics for Brooke- here are some more Malex tears... I promise that this story ends with happy family feels. Just not this installment.

The morning after the reunion, Alex feels like shit. He’s exhausted, a bit hung over from the tequila he drank when he got home, and he’s obviously done something to his hip… Likely when he was pounding into Michael without abandon. 

What had he been thinking? 

He hadn’t is the honest truth. It’s hard to think straight when Michael is around. Always has been. He’d seen Michael looking at him like they were 17 years old all over again and any ability to think rationally had gone out the window. His hormones had taken over as they always do. Never thinking of the consequences. Of how illogical the decision to sleep together would be considering they’d never be together. How much it hurts every time it’s over. 

But what can he say? He sees Michael and his only thought is, ‘mine.’ 

But Michael  _ isn’t _ his. Never really was. And now he belongs to a family. He’s got a wife and a kid. He’s got a whole life without him, and it’s good. If the bits of conversation he’d overheard last night are to be believed, he’s got a job as a science teacher. Alex is proud. It’s what he’s always wanted for him. To have his shit together and be happy and fulfilled. 

Alex just that he always secretly hoped those things would come in time for the two of them together. That he would be the one Michael chose to have a family with. To grow old with. 

Maybe Alex was just angry. Maybe he saw an entire life that he wanted for himself and decided to light a match. After all, hadn’t he been thinking about how he wanted to leave marks for all to see when he’d been fucking Michael in the bathroom? Hadn’t a small part of him gotten greedy and wanted to play for keeps? 

Or maybe he’d just been that lonely. Sick of going through life without somebody to share it with. Sick of quick hookups behind tents, hoping nobody finds them. Sick of keeping the important parts of himself hidden away for nobody to see. Sick of lying in a hospital bed, completely broken, feeling like he doesn’t have a single person he can call to help carry his burdens. 

It doesn’t matter why he did it. He did it. It’s done. And now he gets to deal with the emotional fallout of his body reawakening to how desperately he wants Michael with the newfound knowledge that he will never have him. All his old tricks of convincing himself that things would work out in the future for them are useless now.  _ They _ don’t have a future.  _ Michael _ has a future. Without him. 

And maybe he only has himself to blame for that. Maybe if he’d have listened to Michael’s pleas to be together that would be their future. Or maybe they would have burned twice as bright and half as long. Maybe he always would have ended up here. Aching and missing and utterly alone. 

Knowing he can’t stay in bed forever and wallow, he rolls out of bed and grabs his crutches to make his way to the kitchen in search of something greasy to settle his stomach. There’s a knock on his door, which is odd. He’s been living out at Jim Valenti’s old hunting cabin, about 40 minutes outside of town. He doesn’t exactly get solicitors knocking on his door and he didn’t expect any visitors. He debates ignoring it, but his curiosity gets the better of him. He moves to the door and opens it, surprised to see Michael standing on his porch looking sheepish. 

He holds out a coffee cup from Bean Me Up. 

Alex leans against the doorframe and stares at him, trying to figure out what he’s doing here. 

“I didn’t know how you take your coffee,” he says, holding out a handful of cream and sugar in his other hand. “There’s a lot we don’t know about each other.” 

Alex doesn’t respond. He’s still too busy trying to get his heart to stop racing and reading too far into anything. He doesn’t know what Michael is doing, but he’s 100% certain that he shouldn’t be doing it. Alex has zero interest in being some dirty little secret while Michael has a family of his own. 

“I’d like to learn,” Michael says. “And I’d like the chance to explain.” 

Despite knowing it’s a bad idea, Alex figures he may as well see this one through to the end. He opens the door wider and wordlessly waves Michael into the house. Alex leads the way into the kitchen before taking the cup out of Michael’s hands and taking one cream and two sugars from him, pointedly. Michael nods and says, “I’ll remember that.” 

It’s quiet, but it still makes Alex smile despite how much he knows he shouldn’t. 

“You didn’t get a coffee for yourself?” Alex asks as he stirs the cream and sugar in. 

“I finished it on the way here,” he says, hands in his pockets awkwardly, looking like the boy Alex first fell in love with. “This place is further from town than I expected.” 

“Yeah,” he says, not really giving Michael any more than that. He’s too anxious to get to the point of why he’s here. He doesn’t want to make small talk. Doesn’t want to stand here in his kitchen talking about their day or whatever other bullshit because it’s too much. Michael standing in his kitchen looking like he’s supposed to be here is a little too close to his deepest fantasies and he can feel his heart latching onto it all in a way that’s going to hurt painfully when it doesn't work out. 

“Why are you here?” Alex comes right out and asks, figuring they should get this over with so he can deal with whatever it is and get on with his day. 

Michael rocks back on his heels and opens and closes his mouth several times before saying, “Isobel is my sister.” 

It’s the last thing he expected Michael to say and he’s having a hard time processing it. “What?” 

“Isobel? You saw us together at the grocery store? We aren’t together. She’s my sister,” he says with a shrug, his eyes looking just about everywhere but actually at Alex. 

Alex doesn’t have any words. He can only stand there as he mentally goes through everything he knows about Michael and Isobel, trying to figure out how he’d missed the fact that they are siblings. It doesn’t make sense. Shouldn’t he have known that? 

Michael takes it upon himself to fill the silence. “When we were little, we were all found in the desert.” 

“When you say we…” he asks, having his guesses but wanting to be sure. 

“Max, Isobel, and I,” Michael says. 

Alex nods his head, still struggling to process what he’s being told. The Evans twins grew up with them. Alex has known them since grade school, though, if he thinks about it, he doesn’t really know all that much about them. Still, Michael hadn’t been there with them. He hadn’t moved to Roswell until middle school. 

He puts the lid back on his coffee and shuffles over to the small table he has, taking a seat. Michael tentatively follows after him, looking up at him with hopeful eyes. Alex moves to say something several times, but can’t settle on what to ask. He has so many questions.

Why were they found in the desert? What happened to their parents? Why didn’t Michael get adopted with the Evans twins? And, perhaps the question his heart most wants to ask but is terrified of the answer, if Isobel isn’t the mom to his daughter, who is? 

“I didn’t know,” is what he ends up settling on. Sounding like an idiot. Obviously he didn’t know. 

Michael shrugs, leaning back in his chair. ‘We don’t advertise it. People ask questions about our past and we don’t like talking about it,” he says. 

Alex nods. He can understand that. 

They both sit there in relative silence as Alex drinks the coffee Michael brought him. It’s gone cold by now, lost all of it’s warmth in the drive over. But Alex doesn’t say anything about it. Doesn’t want to shit all over the olive branch Michael has extended. So he just finishes his coffee and then tosses it into the garbage can. 

“I’m a single dad,” Michael says, sitting up in his chair and leaning in a bit. Enough that Alex gets a whiff of rain and his heart pulls at him, begging for him to reach out and touch. “There isn’t anyone else. Just Nova and I.” 

Alex bites the inside of his cheek to keep from saying anything stupid before Michael is finished. 

“That’s her name. Nova Mae. Isobel and I aren’t together. She’s not Nova’s mom. No matter what the gossip mill around town might say,” Michael finishes. 

“Okay,” he says, nodding his head. 

“Is it?” Michael asks as his left hand extends out towards him, not quite reaching, but putting himself within reach should Alex decide to make that move. 

His eyes take in the scar tissue and the bones that never set correctly and a cloud of guilt forms over him blocking out any desires he might otherwise have to take that hand and continue where they’d left off last night. 

“Alex?” Michael whispers, and when Alex meets his eyes all he can see is longing. Michael wants this. Wants him. Alex could just reach out and take what’s being offered to him if he wanted to. Michael wouldn’t protest. Because, despite over four years of distance, Michael is still waiting for him. 

His eyes go back to his hand however, and he tells himself no. 

Alex isn’t completely self-involved. He’s capable of putting the needs of somebody else above his own. It’s part of why he’s so good at his job. Why he’d been promoted to captain as quickly as he had. And Alex isn’t what Michael needs. 

Without Alex around, Michael has managed to get his shit together. And it makes sense. He’s the thing that brought chaos into Michael’s life. He’s the reason Michael’s life started falling apart before graduation. After that day in the shed, Michael changed. He turned down his scholarship and started getting into trouble. And for the next few years, Alex came into Michael’s life suddenly, all passion and lust and longing, and always left behind a broken Michael. 

He’s not stupid. He can read Michael easily. He’s always known that Michael wanted more. That he wanted the relationship, the domesticity, the family. But Alex hadn’t been ready to give it to him. And when Alex finally gave him some real space, Michael was able to find that happiness for himself. 

Fuck. 

Alex can’t do this. 

He pulls his hands away from the table from where they’d been slowly moving closer to Michael’s. He grips the sides of his chair to keep himself from reaching back out. 

Friends. 

That’s what they can be. That’s something Alex has been able to handle in the past. Maybe not with Michael, but with others. After all, it’s not like he regularly leaves Maria or Liz behind in tears. Friends would be good. He’d be able to have Michael in his life on a regular basis without all the heartbreak. 

“So… uh… how old is she?” he asks, because that’s the kind of thing people ask their friends who have kids. 

Michael pulls his own hands back, looking a bit stung before it quickly morphs into a smile. “She’s four.” 

He nods, doing the math in his head as he realizes that Michael had to have gotten a girl pregnant not long after their last fight. Or perhaps before their last fight, depending on when she was born. 

And yeah, that’s not a thread he needs to tug on, considering he can already hear his thoughts going wild with ‘what ifs’ and ‘if onlys.’

He wants to know about Nova Mae and the woman who Michael got pregnant. Wants to hear the story from him, though for what he’s not sure? So he can punish himself with it later? 

“I shouldn’t ask…” he says, recognizing that it’s wrong to want details, especially since Michael had said he was a single dad. If mom isn’t in the picture, it likely isn’t a happy story. And still, he can’t control his curiosity. 

“You can ask me anything,” Michael says, his eyes so eager that Alex loses any reservation and charges forward full speed ahead. 

“Who is Nova’s mom?” 

Michael takes a deep breath. He takes several. 

“Nova doesn’t have a mom,” he says, his words measured. Careful. 

“Right, sorry, forget I asked,” Alex says quickly, realizing that he’s overstepping his bounds. It’s not like knowing the answer to that question will change anything anyways. 

“Alex, no, I just meant that—” 

“It’s none of my business,” Alex says quickly, moving to stand up. “Please forget I said anything.” 

Michael stares up at him, opening and closing his mouth several times before he sighs. “Yeah, okay.” 

“Thank you for the coffee,” Alex says, before he can do something stupid like invite Michael back to his bedroom to lay him out and go for a second round. After all, Michael  _ did _ say he was single… 

“Yeah.” 

Michael stands up and clears his throat, his hands going back to his pockets. Alex wonders if he does that to make sure that he keeps his hands to himself. If Michael gets that same magnetic feeling whenever they are together. 

Alex moves to the door to show him out. When Michael steps back out onto the porch, Alex is about to say goodbye when Michael spins himself back around to look at him and says, “I’d like us to talk. Some more. Again. Later?” 

Seeing him trip over his words helps ground Alex some. Reminds him that this is just as painful and awkward for Michael as it is for him. 

“Sure,” Alex says. “That’d be nice.” 

“I told Sanders I would help out at the shop today. But after? Maybe? I can see if Max would watch Nova and we could meet up at the Pony or something?” 

Alex shakes his head. He’s still too hungover to consider stepping foot in any place that sells booze. “How about dinner at the Crashdown? I’ll buy. We can consider it me paying you back for the coffee.” 

Michael nods, a small smile warming his features. That mixed with the way that the sun is hitting him just right, Alex can’t help but be stunned by his beauty. 

“I get off at five,” Michael says. 

It’s on the tip of his tongue to say, ‘it’s a date,’ but he manages to hold it in. Instead he just waves him off and watches until he’s back in his car and pulling out of the driveway before he closes the door. 

Friends. 

Alex can do this, right? 

He can be friends with Michael without falling back into their old cycles of lust, fuck, leave, repeat. Right? 


End file.
